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Super-short sweet love story

The good news is Bernie’s leg healed just fine. The bad news, really bad, is that Monday evening, he fell over dead. His little life spanned just over a month, as near as we can tell.

That Monday was the day he’d discovered he could run over to the glass door on the screened-in porch to watch for me and hop frantically up and down when he saw me coming. The day he tried to get in the dog bed with Zuzu, who was fine with it, but I told him was a bad idea. She guarded him, but the size differential was too great for safely sharing a bed.

But the last time I went upstairs to get him, he didn’t great me at the door. Zu, who was with me, was confused. I tried massaging his chest, but it was too late. His short little life broke our hearts, and the grandkids were stricken. We miss him, and I still find myself going to check on him before I stop myself.

We’ll never know what happened to him, but we enjoyed him and indulged him. He was a very loved little birdie. And he came along at a good time to teach the grands about life and death and nature. They recognized on their own how much an almost-featherless bird looks like a dinosaur. They watched him mature and cheered all his milestones along with us. The youngest ones, the 4-year-old boys, are learning that when you’re dead you can’t come back. And, that, no, you can’t dig the dead up to look at them one last time. Wouldn’t be proper or pleasant.

I shrouded little Bernie in a beautiful butterfly-covered paper napkin – he’d practiced flapping his little wings but hadn’t achieved flight, at least not in this life. John dug his grave and said a few words, then we covered him with dirt as the dogs looked on mournfully.

One of Bernie’s milestones was learning to drink, first from this tiny jar lid, then from a bigger, deeper makeshift bird bowl.